


Catch and Release

by linaerys



Category: White Collar
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-10-24
Updated: 2009-10-24
Packaged: 2017-10-02 14:06:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,851
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7207
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/linaerys/pseuds/linaerys
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ten years pre-series, Peter chases a different thief.  I mentally cast John Cho as the OMC, and you are welcome to also. Foreshadows Peter/Neal.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Catch and Release

"In order to catch them, you must understand them," Peter's mentor had told him. He was a man with a dry sense of humor, dry as dust, born and raised in New York. From money, people in the bureau said, but Carl never revealed his origins. By the time Peter had stopped being a probie, a year before he met Elizabeth, three years before he started chasing Neal, Peter had come to understand what Carl meant by those words, the unspoken next half: "In order to understand them, you must love them."

Peter was charmed by a figurine and a note left an empty bank vault. He turned it over in his hands, light jet that felt warm to the touch and dusty, and he looked at his fingers after, faintly surprised to see them unblackened by its surface. The note said just, "I know you're watching, Peter." And Peter felt the thrill that would coil warm around his heart and turn into obsession.

Carl laughed when he saw the note. "My time is past," he said.

"No," said Peter. "He just knows you're too smart to be fooled by something like this."

"Fooled?" asked Carl. "How are you fooled?"

Peter didn't answer, and the figurine went into evidence. Peter didn't even yield to the temptation to visit it, in its bag, in its crate, four stories below his desk.

He chased the thief for six months, which seemed like a long time, before Neal led him on a long and merry dance. He left no name, so Peter made one up for him: Jet, after the figurine that Peter's fingers wanted to touch again. In his mind, Jet had dark hair, was tall and slim, wore all black and moved soundlessly as the night. Jet was perfect and beautiful and Peter would capture him.

"You can't admire their artistry so much you don't want to catch them," Carl warned him, when they sat late in the conference room, musing over diagrams of yet another bank vault that Jet--and certainly a team this time--had emptied. No deaths, but this time some guards had been drugged, and one had a bad reaction to it, seizing and cracking open his head on the corner of a marble plinth on the bank's public floor.

The picture that showed the pool of blood was in the center of their bulletin board. "I won't," he said. That was never a danger for him. He loved them, of course, for who wouldn't love these clever bastards, but the consummation of the chase was the catch.

After that robbery Jet disappeared for several months. Peter was put on other cases, easy collars, petty criminals. Unworthy embezzlers, craven in the light of day, of the television cameras that captured their downfall. He felt contempt, and he dreamed about Jet. His last score had been in the millions. Perhaps he'd given it all up and was resting in the Caribbean somewhere, on a beach, with a beautiful woman. Peter couldn't picture the Jet he'd imagined doing that.

Perhaps instead he was flitting about Europe; yes, that suited Peter's image more.

Still, neither Peter nor Carl was surprised when Jet popped up again, just a hint this time, on a phone line that the FBI was monitoring. He was back, there was a new score to be had.

Peter staked out the apartment building where the call had come from. There was no reason to think Jet would be back, no reason to think that Peter would recognize him if he did return.

Peter had an empty apartment with no more company than the mice who sometimes skittered across his floor. He would rather be here, drinking the best coffee he could afford and sitting in a bureau-owned car, parked outside the building. It was a tenement style house in Chelsea, a walk up. Peter watched men and women go in and out, some with keys at the lock, some ringing bells. None of them were Jet.

Then one of them was: a catlike grace, a tilt of the head, and the man who Peter had been imagining walked down the steps, a hat pulled low over his forehead. Peter got out of the car and followed him down the block, along the dark, ivy draped houses, toward the bright lights of 8th Avenue. A few feet before the shadowed quiet of the street gave way to the fluorescent flood, the man turned.

"Why are you following me?" he asked. He had the thin face and mobile mouth that Peter had pictured, and an unplaceable American accent, but his face had Asian features. That, Peter hadn't pictured, but now those details fit perfectly into his image.

"I'm Peter Burke," was all Peter could think to say.

He imagined that the man showed some shock of recognition at the name, but he might not have. "I'm Roland," he said. "I'm having a drink. Will you join me?"

Peter felt foolishly daring, like James Bond drinking with the enemy, when Roland pushed open the door of a dimly lit wine bar and gestured for Peter to precede him. "Do you live in New York?" Peter asked, after they had each claimed a seat at the bar and ordered, Roland a velvety red, Peter an Italian beer, the only beer on the menu.

"Sort of," said Roland, with a sideways smile that tugged on something in Peter's chest. "I've been away for a couple months, but I can never stay away too long."

It felt like a chase in itself, their conversation. Peter tried to reveal little, and Roland gave him tantalizing glimpses of his life, pieces that felt like they fit into the puzzle Peter had been constructing to build his picture of Jet. Roland. To catch him.

Peter limited himself to one beer but still found himself sliding toward Roland off the lip of the low-backed leather bar stool. Roland steadied him with a hand on his shoulder. "You okay?" he asked, bright eyes looking into Peter's.

And then his hand moved up to Peter's neck, and Peter's pulse jumped against it.

"You were looking for me," said Roland. "And now you've found me. What are you going to do with me?"

He's not Jet, Peter told himself, but he knew otherwise. You have no evidence.

Tomorrow he will disappear, another part whispered.

Roland led him out of the bar and back to his apartment. Peter wasn't surprised when Roland brushed his lips across Peter's in the darkness of his foyer. If you get him to fall asleep, Peter thought, then you can look for evidence. It was a flimsy excuse. Roland's waist was slim and hard under Peter's fingers. His mouth parted eagerly to Peter's tongue. Peter's heart hammered high in his chest.

It was quick the first time, hard and hot. Roland was _his_, for these few moments anyway, caught and pinned. It was slower the second time. The second time was the part that was wrong, Peter told himself later, the time when he gave up some of himself to Roland as surely as Roland had done the first time.

"Remember me," Roland said when they were joined together in the dimness, lit only from the streetlight shining in the window.

"I will," Peter promised.

Roland didn't sleep after, but he did go to the bathroom, leaving Peter a few minutes to find what he needed, bill from a stack the bank had marked, and some fibers that would later turn out to match fibers found in the door of a bank that Roland had robbed. With the vantage of years and experience and _Neal_ Peter would later admit to himself that perhaps Roland had not been the master thief Peter had envisioned. Perhaps he was careless.

Roland's face went cold and blank when he saw Peter holding the bill. "Why did you invite me up here?" Peter asked. "You knew what I would find." Roland seemed too dazed to fight when Peter secured him with a twist tie and called in the cavalry. Peter carried the twist tie along the seam of his jacket. Roland would have felt handcuffs, but never that.

Roland blankness turned into anger when the team of armed men stormed his apartment and took him away, but Peter recognized the anger��"it was as much against himself as Peter.

During his trial, he never tried to explain how Peter had gained access to the apartment. Who would believe him? Peter scarcely believed it himself.

Carl scolded Peter roundly for staking out Roland's apartment without supervision or permission, but the criminal was caught, and Peter was too much a hero to be punished. When he promised Carl never to do it again, he meant it. He'd learned how far he could trust himself.

"The criminal and the police officer," Carl mused, as they filed away the case, collecting all the bits of paper that had been spread out over both of their desks, "they need each other. One may not exist without the other. It can be both sordid and elevating. I know NYPD detectives who feel they have more in common with those they lock up than any civilians."

By then Peter could no longer remember what Roland had tasted like, although he could still remember the thrill of possession, like holding a wild bird in his hand.

"He invited me into his apartment. I found one of the marked bills from the last robbery." Peter said. It was the story he had been repeating for months. It tasted like ashes. He needed a new target now, and recognized this is how his life would be from now on, that he must always have a new chase to take the place of the old one.

He met a beautiful girl the next month, with plump cheeks, and dancing eyes.

Nine months after that, he asked her to marry him. Deep in the throes of wedding planning he learned that Roland Zhang had been killed in prison.

It wasn't his job, but Peter went and talked to the warden, his fellow inmates, anyone who could give him answers.

"If you ask me, he was bored," said his cell mate, a sad, skinny old man with hands that shook. "He could have run this place--he was that smart--but it wasn't enough of a challenge. It was suicide by, well, not cop, not here, but suicide anyway. I think he wanted them to kill him."

"He would have been out in ten years," Peter whispered.

Roland's cellmate shook his head. "He wasn't meant to be here. He escaped the best way he could."

Neal was different when Peter finally caught him, not so fragile or alone as Roland had been. Peter had collected pictures of Neal, no need to construct an imaginary man, or give him a name. Neal was strong, he would survive the four years, Peter knew, and then he'd be out again, to lead Peter on another merry dance.

And in the meantime, there were others to chase and catch.


End file.
